Hi there, I just activated CCleaner yesterday and today my entire Downloads folder on Windows Explorer got deleted. I do not know how this happened, any help on how my files can be recovered. Thank god it did not include my documents folder. Now I have added both to the exclusion list. Cannot believe that I paid for a tool just to clear my Downloads! I already checked the trashbin etc. I am currently trying to recover the filles with Recuva but it seems to not be possible. Some help would be very much appreciated, thanks!
Did you run a Custom Clean with “Downloads” ticked?
That would clear the Downloads folder.(The same as Windows Disk-Cleanup will clear Downloads if it’s ticked in that).
As for recovery: What type of drive do you have in your computer.
If it’s an SSD then there is little to zero chance of recovering deleted files from it.
It’s simply the way that SSDs work.
Which makes it even more important that you make regular backups, either to an external drive or to the cloud.
(The only files I have ever been able to recover from an internal SSD were a few system icon files from the initial install. Those system icons seem to be all that you can recover from any internal SSD).
I did run a Custom Clean but however when asked to delete the files I unchecked the Downloads folder and cleaned the rest. However later that day, a notification popped up that around 6 GB could be cleared so I clicked it. Turns out it was referring to the downloads folder and the entire folder was wiped out. It did not go into the trash and just got permanently deleted. I have an SSD so I think it is going to be impossible to reover these files. I have added my Downloads and Documents folders to the exclusion list. Hope this does not happen to my Documents since they are really important and precious files. Making backups of the files now. Did not expect a tool that I paid for to give me so much trouble.
OK, I think I see what happened.
The notification was from was the Smart Cleaning which uses the Custom Clean settings.
When activated your CCleaner as Pro the Smart Cleaning will have turned itself on automatically, and it has more options then in Free.
From the way that you describe it then you did (and still do?) have the Downloads set to be cleaned, but had unselected them after an Analyze so that they didn’t get cleared that time.
However when Smart Cleaning ran you hadn’t unselected them again and so they got cleared.
The boxes I highlight here are unticked by default. You only tick them if you do want CCleaner to remove files from the Downloads folder when a Custom Clean is run.
(You must have ticked at least some of them at some time).
Untick them again if you haven’t already - as long as they are unticked then CCleaner will not delete any files in the Downloads folder.
Once those are unticked you don’t need your ‘Exclude’ any more, but there is no harm keeping it there if you want to.
You may also want to check your Smart Cleaning settings, like I said above there are more options available now that you have CCleaner Pro.
You may want to disable some of those options so that it behaves more like it did when you were using the CCleaner Free. (Personally I turn Smart Cleaning off altogether, and only clean when I want to).
In particular what you describe as happening would have been the options circled here:
As well as setting how much junk to let build up you can also change what it does:
Just a final note that the Health Check cleaning works to it’s own rules (not the Custom Clean settings) and doesn’t touch the Downloads folder at all.